IYC-Y participation in Food Systems Summit 

“The road is long and we need to accelerate our steps.” Mr. Tareq Hassan said..

The International Youth Council – Yemen, represented by Engineer Tareq Hassan, participated in the fourth session on the “ Food Systems Summit 2021” of the Arab Forum for Sustainable Development, following the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit.

More than 2,000 participants from 180 countries, including around 20 heads of state and government and 125 ministerial-level representatives, took part in the summit. The summit set a path to transform global food systems to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals to reduce global poverty and hunger by 2030..

Engineer Tareq Hassan said, “Let us invoke the spirit of this meeting and transform it into a broader momentum to save the sustainable development goals, and concrete daily efforts to make food systems fit for everyone”..

Hassan added that “these goals are more difficult since the start of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the global rise in energy prices and the slowdown in global economic growth followed the conflict.

Hassan called to the necessary investment in infrastructure to ensure access to global markets, develop value chains to help make food systems more resilient, and strengthen trade systems..

He also touched on the importance of aquatic foods in helping to eliminate hunger and malnutrition, the role of accurate data in decision-making, the importance of international cooperation, the basic nature of environmental protection, and the importance of highlighting the hidden costs of food systems in order to make more efficient decisions.

For that Mr. Tareq said: “food systems faced enormous challenges. Hunger had been on the rise for several years, affecting 690 million people as of 2019, while healthy diets were unaffordable for at least 3 billion people. At the time, Same, climate change was already impacting production, and the need to address concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and ecological footprint was more urgent than ever. The role of food systems in the emergence of new infectious diseases – a result of biodiversity loss due to unsustainable practices – was already being recognized and the damage to ecosystems they cause”..

At the end of his speech, Tareq said, “I hope that this moment of evaluation has provided us with a comprehensive shadow to know where we stand, what we have done so far, and what we should do to move forward,” noting that “the road is long and we need to accelerate our steps.